The first time I heard about electronic cigarettes was when my chain-smoking, soft-drug hitting friend came back home for spring break and puffed up on a little blue light. After he explained that he was trying to quit smoking and this battery-powered alternative to the real thing was making his parents a lot happier, I got to thinking—who else would benefit from receiving the magical gift of a wanna-be (but oh-so-much-better) cigarette?
The way e-cigs bascially work is that an atomizer vaporizes what’s known as e-liquid, which releases a nicotine-free vapor, so you get all the pleasure of breathing out variously-shaped rings of smoke with none of the addiction. This is a step up from a little over ten years ago, when the first e-cigarette came out and featured nicotine dissolved in a propylene glycol solution. Now, it’s perfectly clear that e-cigarettes are the next step into the future, but why are they the perfect gift to give to the smoker in your life?
Although research is still on-going on the topic of whether or not e-cigarettes can cut down on nicotine abuse, consumers of e-cigarettes are touting them as the next thing in nictoine-replacement therapy. Just as smoking created around itself a whole sub-culture that was associated, at one point, with being “cool,” “bad,” or “fast,” there is a rapidly expanding culture associated with smoking e-cigarettes known as “vapers.” This new hobby is seen as a safer alternative to smoking, if only because the resultant vapor isn’t going to do all the damage second-hand smoke from tobacco cigarettes does. With the sub-class of vapers comes the practice of cloud-chasing, a self-explanatory hobby that your smoker is liable to get very caught up in. Let’s face it—a technology that’s built on the same system as asthma inhalers can’t go wrong.
There’s no denying that there are many annoying facts of life associated with smoking regular tobacco cigarettes—nobody likes a smoker’s cough, yellow teeth, or that fume-y cigarette smoke clinging to all your clothes. E-cigarettes offer the same answer to that oral fixation—just kidding!–but with none of those side effects. This newfangled personal vaporizer has thousands of exultant testimonials backing up its use; some say the morning smoker’s cough disappeared altogether, others say that their blood pressure stabilized. Who knew? They say they breathe better, sleep better, and beg the FDA not to take e-cigs off the market.
Interestingly, most of the people smoking electronic cigarettes today are former tobacco cigarette smokers of yesterday; if all of them are looking for a replacement and many seem to have found it in e-cigarettes, it stands to reason that there’s, well, a reason. They’re cheaper, they don’t smell as bad, and you reduce the risk of heart attack, cancer and stroke—all the more reason to buy the smoker in your life this much safer alternative. The ecigarette industry will thank you, and so will your smoker.
